


violent new continent

by spiekiel



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Character Study, Dreams, Gen, beyond thunderdome, the road warrior - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-09
Updated: 2015-09-09
Packaged: 2018-04-19 21:22:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4761497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spiekiel/pseuds/spiekiel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maybe that’s just the phantom motion of tires on sand, someone else’s cool hand on his burned forehead, but he knows if you drive long enough you always come back to where you started from.</p>
            </blockquote>





	violent new continent

i

 

Max has been taught not to hold onto things.

 

His home, his happiness, sanity, direction, his wife and his daughter and his dog and his car, a million times his car, the sky and the colors and all the kids he couldn’t save, hope sifting through his fingers like so much sand, _so much sand_ , the world on fire, and if you have enough things taken from you you learn to get the hell out of there before it can _hurt_ anymore. 

 

So he does.

 

ii

 

So he takes as muchgasoline as he can carry, hung on the ends of a long pole braced over his shoulders, and walks out into the dust and the sun on fury road until he finds his car upside down in an embankment, only two wheels left on, so smashed up that no one’s even bothered to scavenge it yet.  

 

He levers it back upright with his whole body, spends the next three days fixing the shredded engine.When he’s done he closes the hood, fills up the tank, and sits behind the wheel for nearly an hour feeling the echo of the howling wind and the rushing rage in his skull.

 

Then he drives.

 

iii

 

What used to shock him awake in the dark were the quick back-and-forth whispers that sounded like they were right in the car with him, the awed tremor through a huddle in a cave saying _tomorrow-morrow land -_

 

What wakes him now is Splendid and Toast and Capable and Cheedo and the Dag, _screaming -_

 

iv

 

He drives east until he hits the salt flats, and then he turns and drives north, because if you head south for long enough you start to see the hulking carcasses of cities in the distance, but north there’s only desolation and more desolation and Max can let his broken brain do what it wants.

 

He’s not lost, but he doesn’t see another person for eight days.

 

There’s a dog, once, silhouette distorted by the heat rising off the crest of a dune, and the thing is half-starved and mangy, tripping and panting.The stack of bean cans in the back would be enough to feed it, but Max steps hard on the gas and keeps moving, because right now the only thing that anyone can take from him is his life and that’s all he has the strength to fight for any more.

 

v

 

If he had stayed - 

 

If his blood were anything but high-octane, if his heart growled anything less than two hundred kilometers an hour, if he thought he had a chance of protecting anything he wanted to keep - 

 

He thinks he would’ve liked to climb to the top of the Citadel and look out, see if there was any hope left out there in the unrelenting unending unconquerable waste.He doesn’t think there is, and he’s not sure what he would do if there were, but he might have liked to look, at least.

 

vi

 

There was a dream he used to have.

 

Back when he remembered what his life looked like before, when he remembered his daughter’s face and the way his wife felt curled up against him at night.

 

He would come home - home was green, because green was good and good was all he remembered about home - and he would be barefoot, stepping in the grass, and he would look down and the wetness on his skin would not be water but blood seeping between his toes.He would look out, ahead, and see their bodies, strewn and broken, but - they didn’t die here, they died on the road.Somewhere, he remembers.

 

If there was a scream pushing at his lungs when he woke, it never made it out of his throat.

 

vii

 

He remembers that the world is round the same way he remembers that he must have had a mother, once, and she might have rocked him to sleep - 

 

Maybe that’s just the phantom motion of tires on sand, someone else’s cool hand on his burned forehead, but he knows if you drive long enough you always come back to where you started from.

 

viii

 

There’s a dream Max has now.

 

He sees the blood spread across her stomach, between his fingers, he cleans it away with a rag and with his thumbs and with his tongue, tastes the way her lungs open up under his hands.She twists her fist in his hair and _pulls_ , and he presses his lips against his ear and rumbles, “ _Furiosa_ \- “

 

ix

 

He finds other things to try and die for.

 

The waste makes him fight every day, but he wanders hundreds of suns and hundreds of moons and never finds anything that makes him want the hard broken-bone breath of victory more than the sound of her scream, her battle cry, her mourning pure anguish _rage_ visceral _fury -_ the road chews him up and chokes him out and he survives but he never feels so alive as when her arm was the one thing between him and - 

 

Someday, the road carries him back.

 

x

 

Their hands are soft, calluses fresh, skin clean, not cracked and dry, and every time they touch him there’s some kind of push behind it, like they’re not used to not having to fight people off, but Max is gentle and weary and loose-limbed, and he’ll have dreams about them now, too - 

 

Cheedo crying for him, Toast bruised in the wreckage, the Dag mowed down while she tries to run away, Capable dragged away by her hair, kicking, begging for him to save her - 

 

xi

 

He doesn’t stay long, but he comes back.

 

When his mind calms down long enough for him to sort out one thought from the next, he knows that it’s a bad idea, that if the Citadel falls he won’t fall with it, because he never does, never dies, and he’s forgotten more than he ever knew but he’s learning that he’ll never find anything half as strong as her heart beating under his ear at night, not in the waste and not in the world that’s not flat even if he’s never seen it curve - 

 

xii

 

Max drives.

 

All he remembers is the road, because if all he remembers is the road then he doesn’t remember losing them, his wife and his daughter and his dog and all those children, because the road only goes forward, reverse and you die, look back and all you see is what’s chasing you - 

 

So he follows the road and he finds the end of it -

 

Here, at the brutal twist of her hands in his hair, at his mouth between her legs, at growling her name like a prayer into her own heat, at her breathing her battle cry above him, at both of them between the door and their girls, at the last oasis in the waste, soon to be gone - 

 

xiii

 

And it will hurt when it goes, he knows this, he has been taught this, but when it goes so will he, back in his car and back into the dust and the heat and the pain.

 

They called him _road warrior_ , in some other life, some other place, but that’s still what he is.

 


End file.
